"The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game."
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Quote collection
Susan Sontag quotes (page 24 of 27)
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought."
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"A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture"
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"Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross."
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"In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one."
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"People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration."
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"If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that."
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"One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another."
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"art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past."
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"I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers."
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"Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!"
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"In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art , Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community."
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"A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2."
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"Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I."
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"She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies."
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"Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world."
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"I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets."
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"One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful."
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"Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything."
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"False values begin with the worship of things."
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